


Caesura (It Wasn't || Worth the Ride)

by angelgazing



Category: CSI: Las Vegas
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-22
Updated: 2010-02-22
Packaged: 2017-10-07 11:53:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/64915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angelgazing/pseuds/angelgazing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He left on Friday, thinking it was Thursday still, and he didn't bother to say goodbye.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Caesura (It Wasn't || Worth the Ride)

     **i.**

He left the first week in April, just as dawn was bleaching the sky, the sun peeking over the horizon. There's never been anything like the lights of Vegas as morning approaches, when it's nighttime cool and twilight bright, and he shines his flashlight on the sidewalk and it's _useless_. He's never liked Vegas by day.

The real case closed on Tuesday, with a beetle crawling around in the folds of the suspect's sleeves. And he finished his paperwork and packed a bag, because (Catherine snuck up behind him in high heels, her fingernails too long as they hooked over his pen and scratched the back of his hand as she pulled it away and told him to go home) he had too much vacation time saved up. He left on Friday, thinking it was Thursday still, and he didn't bother to say goodbye.

He didn't really see any reason to.

There's a payphone on the corner between the motel he's the been staying past two days—where the sheets are reasonably white and the walls are that color of beige that's supposed to be soothing and the TV gets static, pay-per-view pornography and news if he can catch it in the right mood, and there's a cockroach living under the sink in the bathroom that he's named Teddy, just because—and the kind of roadside diner that Vegas doesn't have. The kind built for truck drivers and travellers, with sticky floors and greasy food and a filling station with a diesel pump just down the road. He looks at it through the window for twenty minutes before leaving his plate, half-empty and cold, and buys a postcard instead, with the loose change in his pocket, because he left his last single on the table for the waitress, tucked under the water glass that had been empty since before she brought his food.

It's got a lake on the front and he has no idea what to put on the back, really. There's some distant part of him that feels empty, and it's raining outside in ways that make him think _storm_ because he's spent too much of his life in the desert. It's April and there's still ice clinging to the branches of the trees when he wakes up here. He figures it for homesickness, the way his stomach churns and his fingers absently grip an ink pen just to drop it again, to lose it in the covers of the bed that didn't get made today either.

He doesn't like it here, he decides, the way he decides that _that_ skull is ready to be boiled and rebuilt. The way he decides that it was two days instead of three, and he's not old enough to go through a midlife crisis, and he doesn't dislike Catherine's husband he dislikes _Eddie_, and leaving at dawn is the way a man permanently on night shift slinks away, because there are questions he doesn't know the answer to and there are questions that he's not ready to face yet.

Putting a name to a face doesn't always give you the ID. They got Jane Doe's killer, but her family isn't resting any easier, because they still don't know.

He's tired now and he has been since he got here, since he left. It starts raining heavier and he goes to sleep and doesn't think of anything out of practice.

(Part of him wants to be able to say: You're telling lies, I know you are. You're lying to yourself and you're lying to me and to him and to _her_. You're beautiful and you're a liar and you're just as lonely as you think I am. I'm fine and I'm a liar too and you should come to bed now, because I'm tired of this feeling and I don't know what to do with the fact that I want you here.)

 

     **ii.**

He dreams of her voice on the phone, thin and tired and far away, saying, "Gil, what do you think you're doing?" because she's the only one who would ever ask him that.

There's a name for that, somewhere, and he'd find it if he looked, maybe, but looking is all he ever does. There's a name for that in every language, probably, and he knows enough to know that he should know it. But that's too much knowing for nine in the morning, because he's never worked the right way.

He thinks of her too often, in the stillness of his car sitting in the sun in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart store that he can't make himself enter. He gets a sandwich and a full tank of gas from a place lacking a name (he understands it, in a way that doesn't make sense) and drives east.

 

     **iii.**

The waitress is fifteen at the most, braces and thick hair and short, clumsy fingers. Her name is Emily, which sounds girlish to his ears. It sounds _young_, and he didn't know he became old enough to think that yet. She's got lace on her apron that's yellow with tea-stains, a bruise on her wrist that looks like a thumbprint and thick blue eye shadow like she's fooling anyone at all.

He's not a cop, he's a scientist, and he can only imagine how Brass would handle this. How Brass would react if he could see it and know it, the way that Gil does: knowing like how he knows his name and the life cycles of a fly, with absolute certainty.

She smiles and her eyes look older, maybe, like she's tired already. It's three in the afternoon and there's not another living soul _here_, he thinks, not in this room or the next. There's the kitchen, where he can hear the hiss of too loud arguments and the rattle of dirty dishes, but it seems miles away.

Emily sets his coffee down in front of him and walks away and he lets her.

He stirs in sugar and cream, the powdered kind that's supposedly made from a real dairy product, it was probably stored in the same place, once upon a time, and the powder spills out over his fingers. He stirs his coffee, and it still tastes day old and burnt, the way that coffee tastes at the lab at five in the morning to anyone brave enough to try it.

She brings him his plate, a burger and fries piled high, and knocks over the salt. For a second she looks like she's going to cry, and he's never known what to do when _that_ happens at all. "I'm," she says, just barely above a whisper, "I'm so sorry," she says, and _sounds_ like she's going to cry, but then she bites her lip, and shakes her head a little bit and gathers up whatever little bits of hidden strength skinny teenage girls and stubborn women have that keeps them walking in four inch heels all day, and smiles. "I'll just—"

"It's fine," he tells her, and means it. He shrugs, and doesn't notice when Emily walks away this time. He loops a C there with the tip of a french fry and that's more frightening that anything else, really.

Emily is sitting at a table in the corner, watching him, and he thinks Catherine would probably know what to do about this, but he doesn't, at all, and because the obvious answer is the stupid one and he thinks of her too often since he's been trying to escape.

 

     **iv.**

He spends three days driving in circles, catches four states over and over again and doesn't even mind it. April's rounding up and he's only pretty sure he'll still have a job when he gets back, but it's still cold in New England, wind whipping hard in the valleys between the mountains that are nothing like the ones he crossed to get here. That's what makes him drive west again, it's the cold and the fog and the chill.

The air is thick with it, when the sun is rising in the mornings and he's still driving from the night before like he's got somewhere to be. It makes him shiver, the heater turned up and his windows going cloudy, and it's not right for it to be this way. It isn't.

The lady behind the counter at the all night truck stop he stumbles across has lines around her eyes, her mouth, her face pulled tight as she watches the morning news on TV, muttering to herself about '_damn shame_'s and '_look what the world's coming too_.' She smells like cigarette smoke and her teeth are yellowing with it. There's a cup of coffee behind her that's probably cold. She's got the look he's seen before, worn down women with hard lives, the dancers and prostitutes in Vegas, they've got a shorter lifespan for all sorts of reason.

(He saw Catherine dance once, when he was asking the owner of the place she worked at some questions, investigating the rape of another dancer just outside in the alley, he looked over at the stage and she was up there in silver high heels and a g-string with fringe that went one way while her hips went the other, always just a step behind, trying to catch up. She had a shock of blonde hair, not blonde, but white blonde, bleached blonde. Stripper blonde.)

She gives him his sixty -three cents change in dimes and never meets his eye, just sort of sways to the Who in the background singing about how this is a teenage wasteland like she still remembers hers and watches the news and shorts him three cents and some part of him is vaguely amused but most of him has been running away for too long and she's got hair so blonde it could only come from a bottle, with dark peeking up at the roots, and he doesn't look at the dancers when he goes into the clubs for interviews anymore.

The fog isn't lifting, and he drives west and Catherine was a redhead when he left and he liked her better that way.

 

     **v.**

He gives up the ghost in Kansas. Though probably not the one he should; probably. More the one that he can't not anymore, because in a couple of days is May, and he doesn't want to be driving in the wrong direction anymore.

She sounds like he dreamed she would, is the first thing he thinks, her voice is tired and thin and far away, when he finally calls to check the messages on his machine at a pay phone outside of a grocery store that's got a field of wheat across the two lane street.

She says, "Gil, it's been three days and four major cases. It's time to stop hiding now. Call me would you?" She says, "This isn't funny, Gil." She says, "Listen, you can't just take off for a week and not tell your best friend where you're going." She sounds desperate, when she says, "So, who'd you get to feed the racing roaches?"

"Things are crazy here," she whispers finally, fifteen and a half messages in, in the middle of a sentence about the dangers of anti-socialism in rapidly aging science geeks with bug obsessions, "we got three bodies covered in maggots yesterday and had to farm out, so don't think I'm the only one that misses you. I left Eddie on Tuesday because I found him with Tanya, Lindsey keeps crying and the new DNA guy sneezed on four different samples today. If you're dead on the side of the road somewhere you better have at least gone out in some spectacular teenage boy type sex stunt with whoever you picked up along the way. If you aren't dead when you get back, I think I might kill you, because everything is falling apart and I think you started the trend."

He hangs up and wonders for the first time if maybe he should have looked for a motive for this.

 

     **vi.**

In New Mexico at four in the morning he meets Janie, when he sort of stumbles over her on his way inside the gas station. She's leaning against the wall outside, barefoot and smoking a cigarette, crying and wringing her free hand in her dress, her long, long black hair all the way down to her waist going left when she sways right, sways right into him,and tells him that she lost it all on the flop and now she was never going to Vegas.

Janie's toes are dirty, when she stands on them to reach the top of the ice freezer, to try and find the key she left there. Her toenails are painted pink and her mouth is painted red with lipstick that smears at the corner and forms an O around her cigarette.

He pays to fill up his tank and buys a Coke and she catches his wrist outside and kisses him and he pretends that she doesn't taste like stale Marlboro Lights and wax and regret. He tells her, as he walks to his car and she follows him, about the mating habits of the Orthodera novaezealandiae, he tells himself, he tells the car door. He raises an eyebrow and she laughs, and tells him her name and asks, "So, do you think it'd be worth it?"

And the honest answer is no.

 

     **vii.**

You can't come home like you leave it, and he's been around long enough to know that, at least, that. Doesn't meant that he doesn't try, sneaking in with the second week of May peeking around the corner, and his supervisor raising an eyebrow and trying to glare sternly but then muttering something that closely resembles appreciation for deeds of deities.

Catherine sneaks up behind him in her high heels and slaps the back of his head with a case file. "So how was the trip?" she asks drily, in a way that's got another question lingering underneath it, like maybe she really wanted to ask, "Where the hell have you been?" But then that's exactly the kind of question that Catherine wouldn't hesitate to ask him.

"It was," he answers slowly, and sitting down his bag and pulling out a jar of fireflies he paid a kid five bucks to catch in town outside of Phoenix with a population less than that of the smallest casino on the strip on a slow day, "informative, I think."

"At least you learned something," Catherine says, like she can't believe him, but that's nothing new. Her fingertips dancing across the lid of the jar the second he sits it down and it's too bright in here to see them the right way. She raises her eyebrow at him like she expects something, and he's got absolutely nothing to give her. She says, "Welcome home," and it's the closest thing to what he needs to hear that he'll ever get, probably.

He nods, and wants to say: I thought of you the whole time, you know, and I think I went there to get away from you, because I feel like I'm drowning, like there's water in my lungs instead of oxygen when I breathe in your perfume. I thought of you the entire time, through too many states and too many nights and too much television and the interstate system is failing and I couldn't get away at all, because you're everywhere now; you're everywhere and I'm afraid that I finally found the word for this.

She walks away with a smile, with the look she gives Lindsey sometimes, when she's done something unexplainable but unobjectionable. He puts a stack of postcards on the corner of her desk, under her coffee cup and between the pile of paperwork to-do and the empty outbox basket, and all seven of them are blank.


End file.
